Bernardo Bertolucci

  • Bernardo Bertolucci – Il conformista AKA The Conformist (1970)

    1961-1970Bernardo BertolucciDramaItaly

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    This story opens in 1938 in Rome, where Marcello has just taken a job working for Mussollini and is courting a beautiful young woman who will make him even more of a conformist. Marcello is going to Paris on his honeymoon and his bosses have an assignment for him there. Look up an old professor who fled Italy when the fascists came into power. At the border of Italy and France, where Marcello and his bride have to change trains, his bosses give him a gun with a silencer. In a flashback to 1917, we learn why sex and violence are linked in Marcello’s mind. (IMDb)Read More »

  • Bernardo Bertolucci – Prima della rivoluzione AKA Before the Revolution (1964)

    Drama1961-1970ArthouseBernardo BertolucciItaly

    Quote:
    The study of a youth on the edge of adulthood and his aunt, ten years older. Fabrizio is passionate, idealistic, influenced by Cesare, a teacher and Marxist, engaged to the lovely but bourgeois Clelia, and stung by the drowning of his mercurial friend Agostino, a possible suicide. Gina is herself a bundle of nervous energy, alternately sweet, seductive, poetic, distracted, and unhinged. They begin a love affair after Agostino’s funeral, then Gina confuses Fabrizio by sleeping with a stranger. Their visits to Cesare and then to Puck, one of Gina’s older friends, a landowner losing his land, dramatize contrasting images of Italy’s future. Their own futures are bleak.Read More »

  • Bernardo Bertolucci – La Luna (1979)

    1971-1980ArthouseBernardo BertolucciDramaItaly

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    Variety wrote:
    La Luna is a spectacle-sized melodrama filled with a variety of themes – plots and subplots that merge asymmetrically into a melodramatic mold.

    The saga is of Jill Clayburgh as Yank lyric star afflicted with professional neuroses, fading pipes, a son on drugs and a close-to-incest mother-son development.

    Sudden death of singer’s spouse and decision to resume singing in Italy with son Joe accompanying, moves the scene from Brooklyn Heights to Rome where the mother-son cleft takes over from Verdi appearances. Her battle to break down his detachment and drug habit is the core of the film – with her own career at stake as the voice gives under stress.Read More »

  • Various – 12 registi per 12 città (1989)

    Alberto LattuadaBernardo BertolucciCarlo LizzaniDocumentaryErmanno OlmiGillo PontecorvoGiuseppe BertolucciItalyMario MonicelliMauro BologniniMichelangelo AntonioniTVVarious

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    Promotional omnibus film, made for the 1990 FIFA World Cup in Italy, featuring portraits of 12 Italian cities.
    For all those who will not be going to Italy for a vacation this year… here is the next best thing. A who’s who of Italian directors anno 1990 turn their cameras on a specific Italian city. Most of these (very) short films do not have dialogue of any kind, and rely instead solely on the beauty of the images and music to depict the various cities.

    Directed by
    Michelangelo Antonioni (segment “Roma”)
    Bernardo Bertolucci (segment “Bologna”)
    Giuseppe Bertolucci (segment “Bologna”)
    Mauro Bolognini (segment “Palermo”)
    Alberto Lattuada (segment “Genova”)
    Carlo Lizzani (segment “Cagliari”)
    Mario Monicelli (segment “Verona”)
    Ermanno Olmi (segment “Milano”)
    Gillo Pontecorvo (segment “Udine”)
    Francesco Rosi (segment “Napoli”)
    Mario Soldati (segment “Torino”)
    Lina Wertmüller (segment “Bari”)
    Franco Zeffirelli (segment “Firenze”)
    Read More »

  • Bernardo Bertolucci – Novecento aka 1900 [Extras] (1976)

    1971-1980Bernardo BertolucciDramaEpicItaly

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    Synopsis

    Quote:
    Bernardo Bertolucci’s vast historical melodrama used the massive popular, critical, and financial success of its predecessor, the scandalous LAST TANGO IN PARIS, to mount a production of epic scale. Cut down to four hours for its American release, the film utilizes an all-star Hollywood…
    Bernardo Bertolucci’s vast historical melodrama used the massive popular, critical, and financial success of its predecessor, the scandalous LAST TANGO IN PARIS, to mount a production of epic scale. Cut down to four hours for its American release, the film utilizes an all-star Hollywood cast to tell its heavily Marxist tale of Italian peasants during the twentieth century. Two boys born on the same day are destined for divergent paths; Olmo (played by Gerard Depardeiu as an adult) is born to peasant parents and will become a passionate socialist, while Alfredo’s (Robert De Niro as an adult) bourgeois, landowning origins will lead him to ultimately embrace fascism. Driven by a sincere hope for and belief in political change, Bertolucci’s film is nonetheless made up of very humane individual stories; it concentrates on highly personal experiences of a politically-charged time, which color the little dramas of love, sex, family, and community. It is at once an epic poem and a political manifesto, and it is the product of a director who was unabashedly communist in his youth, contrasting markedly with later works like 2003’s THE DREAMERS.Read More »

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